The word commerce is usually defined as trading on a large scale. Very basically e-commerce, is the ability to sell products and/or services using electronic methods of shopping and payment.

A typical ecommerce solution includes the following components:

An online catalog that lists the products/services you are selling and their prices.

A shopping cart that collects the items a customer wants to buy.

An order form that gathers their payment information, applies shipping/tax, and summarizes the pending order.

Transaction Processing that subtracts payment from the customers account and applies it to your own.

Real-time transaction processing is provided via a vendor. Offline-transaction processing can be done by a merchant using a credit card machine. Of course, order fulfillment is also an important element of ecommerce.

An HTML form posts all of the information needed to process a transaction to your vendor's transaction server. Once the transaction server gets all of the transaction information, the transaction is processed. After the transaction is processed, it communicates the result back to your website, which communicates with the customer, and makes appropriate changes to your database (if inventory control is used).

How Much is it going to cost?

There can be a lot of hidden costs to ecommerce -- and a lot of people try to take advantage of people's lack of knowledge. Here are some general tips:

Setup fees. Most merchant account providers will charge a setup fee. This could cost $100-500 or even more.

Transaction fees. This is typically a percentage of each transaction that is paid to the merchant account provider/credit card companies. Fees vary. A fee of 2.59% is good for online transactions. PayPal charges 2.2%. and no set-up fee. This has made it a popular choice for small businesses or those with only a small number of products to offer.

Monthly fees. There is usually some "gateway fee" associated with online transactions. $25 or less is in the ball park.

What do you need to get Started?

To get started with real-time transaction processing, you need the following:

A web site.

Ecommerce software.

An Internet-friendly merchant account. Even if you have a merchant account for your business, chances are you'll need another one. Since Internet and telephone credit card transactions are viewed as a higher-risk than other transactions, they have higher transaction fees.  
 

A Transaction processing vendor. You need someone to accept and process payments on your behalf. Typically, you'll have a credit card processing vendor -- In many cases, this vendor is determined by your merchant account provider. There are  authorizenet. or linkpoint.net (with linkpoint cart) and others.

All you need to process and manage transactions over the Internet is:

The LinkPoint or Authorize.Net payment system, a credit card merchant account, and a computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser. You don't have to buy or maintain expensive hardware or software. You don't have to worry about security, downtime, or making sure electronic transactions are processed and settled correctly.

Whether your business is for the purpose of selling one product or service or thousands of products, we have a solution to fit your needs.

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